Monsoon season - Singapore style.

First, some statistics. Singapore is the most lightning struck country in the world. Every house and building has a lightning conductor built in. A friend of mine living in Singapore for 18 months, has had their house struck by lightening twice.

Since late October, I've noticed a change in the weather patterns here.... normally that would sound like a dumb thing to say after living here for 4 months, but here in Singapore the weather forecast is always the same - storms and 27 - 32 degrees, add or minus a degree. That's because it's sunny for 11 out of 12 hours of the day, and one hour of seasonal rain or tropical storm....
But since the October school holidays, it's been more and more overcast, and slightly cooler, and the rain lasts longer. That was until this week.
In the last 3 days, we've had two of the most ferocious storms I can remember. The lightning flashes come so fast and often, you can't count them - and the thunder - I reckon I've jumped right off my seat on more than one occasion. The storms pass right over you - you see the flash of lightning, and immediately the thunder crashes and reverberates around you - you can feel the vibrations in the floor (we live on the 3rd floor!). It's deafening. The storm can stay directly over you for up to 10 minutes. And the rain - boy, your visibility is reduced to metres as it falls so heavily. It's like a curtain.

Yesterday's storm was a doozy... It hit about 1.30pm and boy was I glad to be at home at the time. The rain was so dense you couldn't see past the balcony. Our balcony flooded within 10 minutes. Shortly after I received a phone call from the condo office asking me to move my car as soon as I could, as the basement was flooding fast.
When I got downstairs, I had to wade in water about 10cms deep, but was able to move the car to the next level up. The storm boomed and crashed all around for about 40 minutes, then slowly moved on. The rain continued but lessened.
At 4pm while still raining I went to the front of our condo to wait for Zoe's school bus to arrive, and was met by total carnage. There were cars strewn across the middle of the road, with other cars trying to drive around them in both directions and people were everywhere. Someone said the major road (our road runs off) was closed and flooded (it's a 4 lane road). The adjacent condo's basement had totally flooded, and pumping trucks were being brought in to pump out the water. Some cars had been able to get out, and were now parking on the road, around the strewn cars and the cars trying to drive down the road. Chaos. Tow trucks were brought in to remove the cars stranded by the water.
45 minutes late, Zoe's school bus arrives from the opposite direction... by this time I was quite a nervous wreck.
The carnage in our road continues today. The pump trucks were pumping all night to remove the flood waters from the basement of the adjacent condo and cars were being towed out from the basement today. It has totally blocked our road. And guess what - it's just started raining again.